If you haven’t seen this clip from Obama’s recent talk in Canton, OH, just… hot damn. Watch it. He is on fire. He got me so choked up I didn’t even mind the “god bless you” at the end. Seriously, watch it. It’s just a few minutes long.

Seriously, though, Venn diagrams are a concise and satisfyingly geeky way to convey complex information. Instead of writing a paragraph about how some of the people in my life are geeks, and some of the people in my life are artsy, and explaining that those groups overlap , and further that some subset of the overlapping region will find my webcomic project viscerally satisfying, I can draw three circles in a square and you know exactly what I’m talking about.

And Venn diagrams are versatile! You don’t even have to mouth off to anyone any more if you can just scribble some pithy circles on a bar napkin. Draw three interlocking circles titled “smart people”, “sexy people” and “talented people”, then enclose them in a circle labeled “people who aren’t you” within a larger rectangle labeled “everybody”. See? It’s that easy!

Yes, the Venn diagram could be the key to an new, utopic, entirely non-verbal society. Keep your eye on it!

I think the thing that might work in candidate 2’s favour is that he only has one “hurdle” to overcome; if he can spin his way around that he’s good, but candidate 1 will be accused of favouring each of ethnic minority rights, women’s rights and gay rights over the “real issues” — and will probably be unable to evade all three long enough to focus on whatever she’s actually campaigning on.

Update: upon further inspection, being gay is not far off from being an atheist in terms of being selected against. Maybe it’s cuz nobody could be one a them fags iffen they believed in the Word, so they gotta be a devil-worshippin’ atheist! But wow, look at the breakdown by political ideology!

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while, and hopefully this summer I’ll get to work on it more. The idea is that I create a database-driven comic strip. All the characters, plots and so on are stored in a MySQL database, and get interpreted by PHP and turned into SVG.

The amusing thing about this is that, as I work on it and tweak it, the art will retroactively get better. For instance, if a particular character’s template is badly drawn, and I update it as I create new strips, the old strips will automagically get an art update as well

Anyway, I’ve been having fun so far, working on this for an hour at a time, once every couple of months over the past year. Now I’ve got a framework that looks like it’ll speed up development immensely. So long as I create a database schema that conveys all the information I need it to.

I love this bag: it is rugged, has six compartments, sits flat on the table — beautiful. And it’s 10$, which is nothing to sniff at, but isn’t as much as I would have expected. Of course, it’s meant as a utility item, not as a luxury, so that makes sense. Seriously, check this out: